


you're an open magazine

by papyrocrat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Abusive Relationship, Blood Drinking, Episode: s04e12 Criss Angel Is a Douchebag, Episode: s04e16 On the Head of a Pin, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Sam being a total dick, Torture, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-18
Updated: 2012-12-18
Packaged: 2017-11-21 12:22:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/597710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/papyrocrat/pseuds/papyrocrat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The journey from "I don't do that anymore" to "now I can kill."</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're an open magazine

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for the beta, Ray! For the Sam/Ruby square on my [spnpairingbingo](http://spnpairingbingo.livejournal.com) card.

“So, what’s your curfew tonight?” Ruby smirks. “Can’t run around saving seals if you’re grounded.”

  
“That’s funny.” He toys for a moment with the idea of never turning back, of leaving Dean to his Impala and his angels and his denial and all the other things that matter more to him than Sam. “We have a few solid hours.”

  
“I just came through Omaha. Nothing cosmic or whatever, but there are a handful of demons congregating there.”

“Think they’re planning something?”

“I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet.”

She pulls over just after they cross the state line. “Sam.” She stares up at the rearview mirror instead of turning to face him. “I need to know you’re committed to this.”

Sam keeps his eyes on the glass, steady and sure. “I think you already know I am.”

He looks away and gets out of the car. Her door closes with a thud, and his with a sharp slam. She walks over to the passenger’s side and hops on the hood, dropping her feet down on either side of the tire. His breath curls between them as she hands over her knife. He doesn’t exactly wonder why, when she can break skin open with her own nails, she always gives up the one weapon that can kill her.

Demons don’t scar. If they did, she’d be rough as an old school desk, dinged up with petty adolescent secrets of infatuation, boredom, and rage. But they don’t, and the annals of last summer have sunk into her skin as if it never even happened, so there’s no damage done when he digs the tip into the hinge of her jaw and pulls a straight inch toward her cheek.

It’s dark enough that he feels rather than sees a satisfying flinch.

He hangs back for an instant, just long enough to prove that he can, not long enough for the first drop to fall off of her face.

It would look like a kiss, with the way he braces his hips between her knees and the way she shudders when he breathes in her ear. It would look like a kiss to anyone not close enough to see how he sucks and swallows, sucks and swallows, until he gags on the taste of copper and evil.

She sheathes the knife. “You okay there, Sammy?” she asks, her smile bright with mockery.

It’s too cold to stay out another minute, to stand here and warm his hands under her jeans. But sulfur smokes through his veins, and he can’t get back in the car with that smirk dancing in his vision. She flips one more smug look at him, then leans back on her elbows and twists into his hand.

Two, three cars whip north. She moans as their engines fade into the distance.

She pulls herself away and slaps the car keys into his palm. “You drive for a while.”

“Where to?”

She drops back into the car. “I’ll tell you when we get there.”

 

 

*

 

“There” turns out to be a strip mall forty miles north of the city. A half a dozen teenager shapes crawl around a side parking lot, painting large white sigils every third space.

The reedy blond bone sack closest to their corner recognizes Ruby and snarls, but not quite loud enough to save himself. She lunges forward and guts him.

“Ruby! That was a kid.”

“Yeah. And so are all of them. What’s it gonna be, Sam?”

“All at once?” The idea has a certain appeal.

She pulls his rock salt gun from the back of his jeans with her right hand; clenches the knife tighter with her left.

“One at a time, as fast as possible. Can you do it from here?”

He’s ripped the first one out before she finishes speaking.  

“I like these odds a little better.” He hears the usual pleased condescension, but the power crackling through him drowns her out soon enough.

The other four have caught on. One’s smart enough to bolt as the other three attack. He tosses one of them into a mound of snow, salt, and oil, and pulls the next one almost as easily as the first. He pins the third in place against a lamppost and feels his brain screech to a halt.

Ruby has her knife to the throat of the last victim, a girl with blue hair and a lip ring. “What’s the problem, Sam?”

He squares his shoulders, adjusts his aim, and his target laughs. “Awww, it’s okay, Sam. We can just cuddle, if you want.”

“Ruby. Bring that here.” She does, nicking the girl’s jaw along the way.

“What’s that going to do for you?” the demon asks.

He finds the wound by feel with his left hand, brings it back to lick his palm, and clenches his right fist. It’s not his best effort, but the demon yelps. “Do you really want to find out?”  He loosens his grip enough to let it smoke out, dropping the kid to the pavement hard.

The demon in the last girl shrugs. “I’m kind of curious.”

Ruby tightens her grip. “You have to bleed her to save her, Sam.”

“I know.” He doesn’t move. “Just…stop me, okay?”

She spares him the lip for once and nods.

It’s fine, though, it only takes him a minute to pry his eyes open and step back far enough to exorcise the demon.

The girl stirs in a moment. “Oh, my fucking _god_. What’d I even take?”

Ruby nods her head toward the other two kids, at least one of whom will come to. Sam hopes. “Ask your buddies.”

The girl starts to get up. “Hey,” Sam stops her. “Looks like you partied pretty hard there,” and gestures toward the wound on her face.

“Shit!”

“Hey, no, it’s okay. We can take you to the ER.”

Ruby and the girl glare at him like he’s crazy, which is probably fair enough. “Don’t we at least have a bandage in the car, Ruby?”

“I’m sure we have something.”

“Something” turns out to be a strip ripped off the bottom of one of his old tanks, which has spent the last few months balled up around a scrying chalice. The girl thanks them and lets Ruby walk her to her car. Sam slumps into the passenger’s seat of theirs, and lets the cold bite into him until she comes back.

“What about that last one?”

“Whatever it was, these rituals are on a timer. If it didn’t start by midnight, they missed the window.”

“So we should-“

“Haul ass before it comes back with buddies, yeah.”

She pulls out of the lot. “Think it was a seal?”

Ruby shrugs. “It was something. Now it’s over. At least we know we have them running.”

“Yeah, well, they got us chasing, so.”

“Sam, the best defense-”

He talks over her, hoping to cut off the lecture. “Is a good offense. I know.”

“-is _you_.”

He pushes the seat back and slumps as far down as the dash will let him. “Let’s just get back before last call.” With any luck, Dean will still be out drinking his damage.

Sam fights a sick, sticky headache the whole ride back. She lets it be, almost, until she pulls into an alley two blocks from the motel. “Sam. I know you don’t like the idea” – as if _that’s_ ever mattered – “but you can’t keep doing it with these crazy ups and downs.”

His stomach rolls. “So. Come on.”

She makes a short, no-nonsense cut across her forearm and twists it in front of his mouth. He breathes through his nose and chokes it down. It’s as dirty as ever, but his head starts to clear before he breaks away.

He feels her eyes on him, keeping his own gaze at the floor as she speaks. “I’ll call you when I know something.”

He nods and leaves.

The streets are mostly empty, a few bars along the strip oozing patrons. He hustles back to the motel, and then has to lean on the railing to make it upstairs to the room. He lets himself in as unobtrusively as possible, just in case, but the room is silent and Dean’s bed is the same messy, empty pile of sheets it was when they’d left. He lets out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding and kicks off his trainers on the way to the shower.

He hears the door open and close as the hot water begins to pound his skin back to life. He counts out another seven, eight minutes, long enough for Dean to pass out, until his shower starts to burn.

 

 

*

 

Sam sleeps, he thinks, a crossroads demon skipping in and out of the corners of his mind trying to sell him bullets for the Colt and an _O Magazine_ subscription. He gives up around six forty-five and heads out in search of wifi and coffee, leaving Dean sprawled on top of his comforter.

He presses down Dean’s disapproval of the Starbucks down the street (“they’re fuckin’ everywhere, man”) and slouches around a tiny red table to comb through Essenic apocrypha. The convention-goers invade around ten, and Sam starts to crash. By eleven, he’s back in the room, loaded down with coffee and bagels.

Dean’s just rubbing sleep out of his eyes, if not relaxed, then at least rested. He paws through the bag for a poppy seed bagel, and bites into it whole and dry. “We’ll hang around till tomorrow, when all the magic freaks leave. Normally I’d want to blow town, but there were eyes on these guys for days, so checking out early with a buncha bodies around-“

“Yeah, I get it.”

“Should be a decent night out tonight, though.”

Sam manages to lie down, instead of collapsing into bed. “Sounds good.” It doesn’t. “I’m going to get some shuteye first. Come get me when you want to go.” He won’t.

“Mind if I use the laptop?”

“Knock yourself out.”

“Musta been some walk last night. What’s her name?”

“Mmmph,” Sam mumbles into his pillow.

This time, sleep takes, and when he wakes up the afternoon has faded and Dean is already gone. He flips open his phone to stare at Ruby’s number, lost in thought until the room goes dark.

 

 

*

 

She doesn’t call him for two weeks. He spends three days being indifferent, six days relieved, a fleeting five moments genuinely worried, five days being irritable, and then thirty-six hours trying to shake Dean long enough to call her back.

“Took you long enough,” she snaps. “Did I interrupt your spa weekend?”

 _You’re one to talk_ , he doesn’t say. “What is it?”

“Where are you?”

“Wisconsin.” Dean had been sure that a handful of ghost sightings in La Crosse were legit, but it didn’t pan out before the Midwest reasserted its dominance, snowing them into the motel for three days.

“Good. I think we have something here in St. Cloud. Can you be here in two days?”

“Yeah. I’ll have to find some case to keep Dean in the area, but-“

“That can be arranged.”

“Try not to kill anyone, alright?”

Ruby sighs heavily. “The sacrifices I make for your _conscience_ , Sam.”

“Yeah, I’m a buzzkill.”

“You are, but it’s kinda hot. Check their local paper in the morning.”

He hangs up.

It’s another fifteen minutes before Dean shuffles in with pizza and beer, wet with snow and aggravation. “We’re staying another night,” he informs Sam. “I’m not putting Baby through those roads.”

“Should be okay tomorrow.”

“Should be.” Dean throws back most of his first beer. “Wanna watch a movie or something?”

Sam plugs in his laptop. “Do whatever you want.”

 

 

*

 

 _Ruby gets shit done,_ he thinks ten minutes after he powers up the next morning. He’ll give her that. He lets Dean take his sweet time shaving before giving up and hollering through the bathroom door. “St. Cloud, Minnesota. Forty-one dead cows, a missing minister, and something to do with power failures.”

Dean comes out and picks through the pile of clothes on the floor. “Sounds like our kind of thing.”

Sam nods down at his packing.

“That sounds kinda dramatically like our kind of thing.”

“Yeah, well, you know demons. Not real concerned with bad publicity.”

Dean looks awfully thoughtful for a man wearing three shirts, boxers, and mismatched socks. “No, I mean, that’s a serious ritual. Forty-one, that’s an odd number.”

“And a prime number.”

“Yeah, funny, Urkel. I mean, forty’s a nice round number, mystical significance, blah blah, but there’s gotta be more than that in the immediate area. So why go just over it and leave the rest of ‘em?”

“You think it’s the forty-first seal?”

“Shit. Yes. Should we try to get to Cas?”

That’s the last thing Sam needs, an angel snooping over his shoulder. Still, forty seals. Forty-one. “I think if Cas wanted to be on this one, we wouldn’t have found out about it in the St. Cloud Times.” Or from a goddamn demon, but Dean doesn’t need to know about that.

Dean looks a little disappointed. Sam can’t blame him.

“I’ll call Bobby from the road. See if he’s got any ideas.” Sam tosses him a pair of jeans and starts ramming the rest of Dean’s clothes into his duffel. “Get dressed. Let’s go.”

“End of the world sure lit a fire under your ass, Sammy.”

 _You don’t know the half of it, Dean_. “I’m in the car.”

 

 

*

 

They go straight to the dairy farm that seems to be at the center of it all. The cattle aren’t just dead, they’re lined up head to toe in a grotesque crop circle around a squat old silo.

“Maybe it’s not the death. Maybe it’s the corpses.”

“That’s very existential, Sam.”

“They could be offerings to a scavenger spirit.”

Dean snorts. “Guess who’s coming to dinner.”

“Exactly. So all we have to do is mess with the recipe. Maybe if we corrupt the flesh, it’ll slow whatever the demon is down.”

“Straight-up salt and burn, you think?”

“You start with the cattle. I’m going to trap them in.”

“How?” Sam gestures up at the flat roof. Dean blanches. “Sammy, be _careful_.”

Dean’s problem is that he always looks down.

Sam just doesn’t. It’s easy.

He runs through the spray cans quickly, ends up writing the script in blood.

He drops into the loft. It’s a demon, wearing the minister and a sneer. “I wasn’t expecting a crasher.”

“Yeah, well.” Sam pins it to the wall and pulls out his switchblade. “Surprise.”

 

 

*

 

They stagger into the first motel they pass, and unlock a second-story room to find Castiel watching the sun rise.

“Heaven commends you on your protection of the man of the cloth.”

Dean rips off his coat. “And, you know, the world.”

“Your attentiveness to the seal situation is duly noted, Dean.” Sam’s puffy, exhausted eyes and numb toes don’t count as attentiveness, he supposes.

“What aren’t you telling us, Cas?”

Sam’s heart pounds under Castiel’s even gaze. He can’t know. Not even angels. “You two were irrelevant. This ritual was specific to the forty-first seal.”

“And they jumped the gun?”

“And the forty-first seal fell three days ago. Last night's ritual would have accomplished nothing.”

“Dammit, Cas!”

“We are trying to avoid damnation, Dean. In the meantime, that clergyman has a family who would consider last night a victory.”

“Family.”

“I’m given to understand that matters even to humans.”

Dean looks at the floor. “Yeah. It does,” he sighs.

Sam snatches the keys off the nightstand. “I’m going to head back and see if there’s any intel.”

Cas blinks away just as Sam closes the door.

He doesn’t need to call Ruby to know she’ll be waiting at the altar. He shakes his head.

“Did the seal break, Sam?”

“No. But we still lost.” _Like fucking **always** ,_ he knows she hears him think.

“All the more reason you have to stay on track, Sam. We knew this whack-a-seal wouldn’t hold the line forever.”

“ _We_ knew. What did _you_ know about this when you called me, Ruby?”

“I knew Gregory was here.” It’s Gregory, Sam guesses, whose tangy, rusty blood now claws at his arms and back from deep inside of him. “I didn’t know he was with Lilith, I just knew he was trouble. Even by our standards. By the time I’d found out more, they’d already started prepping for the ritual and I knew it’d get you here.”

“Yeah. You know me so well.”

“Yes, Sam, I do.”

And she does. She knows he won’t reach inside of her with his mind, that he can’t give a wide enough berth to the _nothing_ where that poor dead girl should be. She knows he knows her knife is at her left ankle and that he will tear her jeans to the floor to get at it, anticipates fast enough to keep her balance when he shoves his shoulder under her knee.

It drives him crazy. He won’t let her win this; he _won’t._

He stays on the ground until he makes her gasp and dig her nails into his scalp; until she’ll stumble when he stands up and roughly turns her around. She catches herself (just barely) with an elbow against the wall and shudders when he chips her neck with the knife.

It’s a long red line, too big for his mouth, gurgling with blood and whimpers and _yes Sam now._

He reaches over her head and drives the knife into the wall. _“Don’t.”_

He bends himself around and into her; sucks and swallows, sucks and swallows; bruises her hip with one hand and makes her moan with another.

He chokes back a groan and a mouthful of blood.

Ruby pulls on her jeans and tells him she’ll call.

He slumps against the wall and slides down to the floor, alone with the wind.

 

 

*

 

It’s only been two hours, but Dean is already rubbing a nap from his eyes, itching to leave. Their bags are still packed, and Sam doesn’t argue.

“Find anything?”

“Struck out. Like always.” He stares at the rearview mirror, watching the motel drop away behind them. “So where to? Any leads?”

“Haven’t been to Chi-town in a while.”

“No reason?”

“Do we need one?”

Sam is sick of it all, all of a sudden, he wants more than anything to be _going somewhere_ , not just _be nowhere_ the way they always are. And if they have to be nowhere, he doesn’t know why “nowhere” can’t be in Atlanta or Pasadena or someplace where there’s something alive in the ground and not endless piles of dingy gray snow encroaching everywhere he looks. “You know how birds have the sense to fly south for the winter?”

Dean stares pointedly at the road. “I like the cold.”

Sam leans his elbow against the door and is a terrible person.

 

 

*

 

The motel Dean pulls into is slightly more expensive than usual, could almost be called downtown. Sam’s not sure why Dean doesn’t hate it, but it’s practical for his purposes. “I’m going to hit the Loyola library, see if they have any books Bobby doesn’t.”

“I’m going to enable your filthy research habit and pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“No, you’re right, we should definitely let the world end in order to avoid literacy.”

“Whatever. Don’t take Baby, you know how she feels about traffic.”

“Cars are not people, Dean.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Because people? Suck.”

“Yeah. Fine. I’m taking the L.” That much is true, at least. He clears out his browser history so Dean can’t follow him to the address he’s looked up, a parochial school on the South Side undergoing renovation indefinitely. Ruby’d texted him two hours ago with the name of the parish, and the words “got one.” It’s all he needs to know.

She’s been working it over, he notices when he arrives. The floor under the devil’s trap is puddled in holy water, the knife lies bloody on an old desk, and she’s brandishing a processional crucifix like a bayonet.

“What are you trying to get out of him?”

“Mostly laughs. But I think he’s with Lilith and he’s in town for a reason.”

Sam plays along. “He likes deep-dish pizza?”

“Or he’s here to burn six consecrated buildings in the sixth week of the year of the End of All.”

“That was my next guess.” Sam crosses his arms and stares down at the demon. “Do you know who I am?”

“Some washed-up also-ran that Lilith hasn’t even bothered to squash like the rat you are.”

“Close enough.” From the lines of her silhouette, he guesses she’s hovering at his elbow, picking under her nails with the knife. “So you know you’re going to tell me what you know.”

“Or what, you’re gonna think at me?”

“Sounds about right,” Sam says. He stays close, lays his hand on its head the way Cas does when he takes pity and heals them. “Where are the other seals? Where is Lilith now? Who else is with you?”

The demon shouts in pain and fear, a sound Sam knows all too well. It’s brighter and richer coming from a demon’s mouth than from his own.

Physical pressure won’t add anything, he knows, but he slaps the demon before laying hands on it again. He reaches into it, seizes the tattered wisp of consciousness that once was a soul between his fingers, and snaps. It screams. “Tell me anything, and I can make it stop.”

“It’s just me. Lilith doesn’t tell us where she goes, she just gives orders when it’s time to break a seal. She keeps these things on a need-to-know basis, for some reason.”

“Where’s your next assignment?”

And then the demon laughs, a pained, hysterical edge to it. “Well, I’m sorry, kids, but I can’t help you there.”

“I’m pretty sure you can,” she says. “You’re ready, Sam.”

“For what?”

“You know what.”

“No! There’s someone in there.”

“So what?” Sam feels his mouth drop open. “You know what happens to a host, Sam. He’s been in there for what we did to him, who knows what the demon put him through! If he’s still alive in there, he’s not happy about it. You’re doing him a favor.”

“By _killing_ him? Ruby, what is wrong with you?”

“Nothing! This is how it is. I’m a demon.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not!”

“You sure about that?” the thing in the devil’s trap interrupts.

He wraps it around his wrist and pulls until it groans. “Nobody asked you.”

“You have to know if you can do this.”

“I can.” He is sure, as sure as he is of gravity, of water turning to steam. He knows.

He just doesn’t want to until he has to, is all. It’s not as if he likes this.

“You want to go in there blind? Because I seem to remember that Lilith kicked your ass when you tried to pull that crap.”

It’s the first time she’s thrown Dean’s death in his face since he came back, so he throws a chalice of holy water back at her. It crashes against the wall, almost drowning out the sounds of hellhounds baying and his own sobs ripping through Dean’s sudden silence. “Don’t you _ever!_ Don’t you _fucking dare._ ”

“Yeah? Or what?”

“You know what.”

She twists one shoulder up in a cutting little shrug. And she’s right, if he could afford to kill her, he’d have done it months ago. “Forty-five seals, Sam,” she says quietly.

The demon across the room sneers. “Forty-six.”

“So you did know something.”

It shrugs.

Ruby raises her eyebrows.

He turns away from her, sees only the demon and hears the rush of his own pulse.

“Lilith’s going to destroy all of you,” the demon boasts. “There’s going to be carnage, and misery, and _mmmm,_ I just can’t wait.”

“Lucky you,” he says. “You don’t have to.” He gives it another moment, daring it to disbelieve him, and then raises his hand.

It’s not like the tug-of-war of an exorcism, a focused battle on some-other-man’s land. This is better than sex; it’s better than fucking _air._ There’s nothing to fear and nothing to save; the only something he sees is an end in sight, a fight that will be over.

The demon lights up as bright as the morning, and they both crackle with wrath until the host crumples dead in its chair.

Sam inhales deeply. Steadies his shoulders. Steadies his voice. “Just hope he doesn’t have buddies around.”

Ruby is breathless. “Well, if he does. You know what to do.”

 _Over,_ he thinks. _Over, over, over._

“Every last fucking one of them.”

“Hey, there, Dark Avenger. Let’s stay focused.”

“I am focused,” he says. “‘Kill them all’ is a focus.”

She swings around in front of him. “Aww, is that really what you think of me? I’m hurt.”

“Yeah.” He picks her up easily and she hangs on tight. “It is.”


End file.
